


Stasis

by stardropdream



Series: Dust on the Ground [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Episode: s05e13 The Diamond of the Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 18:05:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1992597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardropdream/pseuds/stardropdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He always thought it would be a dramatic day – the day that Arthur came back.</p><p>In reality it is one thousand five hundred sixty-seven years before Arthur comes back.  And it happens on an unremarkable Tuesday in June, of absolutely no significance and no lingering effects on a magical level.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stasis

**Author's Note:**

> A little late jumping onto this bandwagon, but hey. I was writing this 'Arthur comes back' fic that was sliding into 40+ pages, so I decided to break it up into a more manageable size of one-shots.

Merlin is waiting – has been waiting for a long time. 

The long stretch of years, ultimately, is not as bad as Merlin thought it’d be. The first hundred years, perhaps, were the hardest – getting over that hurdle, learning to live, learning to breathe, learning to exist even once all the other lives he’d known winked out, left only with the children of their children, distant and far away – already feeling as if he is disconnected from that time. After that, the rest just seems to stretch on and he is used to it. 

He has lived centuries. Centuries waiting, centuries of living (without truly living, perhaps, in some ways). In other ways, he has lived. He has experienced lifetimes and lifetimes. But he is not living even as he is living. He is living even as he is not living. 

He is waiting. He is stasis. 

 

-

 

Today, like every day, he sits at the window of the little cottage, tiny and unfamiliar to everyone but himself, and he looks out the window, and he sees the lake in the distance, past the tiring thoroughfare of passing traffic. The mist always stays there over the still water, long after no one else may pay attention to the lake, long after so many wouldn’t realize there’s even a lake there at all, the distant tower crumbling further and further to its dust. But he is waiting, still, and he sits at the window and he sips his tea and finds some solace, if only for a moment, in letting the warm drink soothe away the cold of his bones, the cold that’s seeped down into the marrow, ancient and unforgiving. Most days he appears old simply because he feels old. Most days he is old because no one looks twice at the lonely man who lives alone. Alone. 

It is dangerous to become a form for too long, though, to forget one’s true form. He ebbs most days – between the old and the young. It is dangerous. Merlin knows this. Truly changing one’s form is dangerous, because one can become lost in the aspect then assumed. He becomes old because he appears old. He forgets and fluctuates and moves slowly, because that is what the old do. He is older than anyone else in the world, and he feels it most days. He does not appear old for long, drifting between the ancient years he should reflect and bouncing back to the same youthful face that left Camelot all those lifetimes ago. 

He sips his tea. He sits at the window, watching the lake. Waiting. He searches for ripples. He searches. He waits. 

He does not always wait by the lake like this. Sometimes he can even go years – decades, even – without returning. But he always does return. And the last fifteen years or so have caused a deeper weariness in him, one he hasn’t felt for a few centuries now. It’s easier to wait by the lake some days. And some days, there’s nothing more painful, to constantly be faced with the unmoving water. To constantly be faced with the years and years of loneliness – waiting for him, waiting for the one who does not wake up. 

“Please,” he says, and his voice wisps across the surface of the tea, wisps across the surface of the lake. 

His voice is quiet, even to himself. 

“Please,” he says again, fingers curled tight around the teacup. “Please come back today.”

He says this every day, when he remembers to. 

 

-

 

He always thought it would be a dramatic day – the day that Arthur came back. 

He envisions a churning lake, a clap of thunder, the sudden, sharp return of magic in the very air he breathes. At first, Merlin thinks it’ll be fifty years after his death: a good, significant number. (Not good, perhaps, really, because waiting is painful and those first years are horrible. All the years are long and excruciating. But the number itself is “good”.) And then the time comes and goes and he thinks one hundred years (another “good” number). But that day comes and goes and he thinks two hundred, and it continues from there until, finally, he thinks to himself – perhaps a thousand years. But that day comes and goes and Merlin begins to run out of significant numbers – because thinking one million years is too much and too painful, even if he knows he would wait that long – and longer. He’d wait until the sky melted away and there was no earth left to wait upon. He would wait even as every star winks out of the universe and he is left in cold and bitter darkness. Still he would wait. 

He always thought it would happen on Arthur’s birthday, or on the anniversary of the day of his death, or on the anniversary of the day he and Arthur first met, or the beginning of the year – a fresh start, a new beginning. 

In reality it is one thousand five hundred sixty-seven years before Arthur comes back. And it happens on an unremarkable Tuesday in June, of absolutely no significance and no lingering effects on a magical level. Just a Tuesday. Just a day in June. But that is the day that Merlin’s life begins again. 

 

-

 

It isn’t that Merlin did not live. In thousands of years, to not live even a single day would be worse than death itself (and how Merlin longed for death, most days). But it is always a life that waits to begin again, fully. But Merlin lives and he loves – he loves some people, but never as fully as he loved Arthur (nor them, he knows, as much as Arthur loved him – a realization that hurts Merlin to his core because, of course, he only realized as much when it was too late). But he learns languages. He learns recipes. He learns art and instruments and he even learns how to juggle for real, if only because he imagines the day Arthur will come back and stare as he’ll easily juggle eggs and torches and strangely shaped fruit Arthur has never had the experience of eating (and Merlin can’t help but laugh to think of how Arthur’s face would twist up when he tries pineapple for the first time).

(Oh, and how those moments of imagining are both painful and wonderful, because, he thinks, it’ll all be worth it when he returns.) 

There are so many things Merlin can’t wait to show Arthur. (If only Arthur would stop making him wait like this.)

The world changes around him, but Merlin is a set point – the northern star in the sky as he waits, letting the lake revolve around him. 

For centuries he didn’t dare leave the lake. He sat, quiet, so very quiet – never speaking a word. He listened to the news of Camelot but never returned. He thought, bitterly, about five years after Arthur was gone and _buried_ , much as he was—

Thought, _See, sire, I can be quiet._ And he thought of Arthur’s reaction and all it did was burn steady in his gut. _See, Arthur?_

But he is the northern star. The light by which to be guided home. He will wait, the fixed point, until Arthur can return to him. He knew that then as he knows this now. He’s known this for years and years. 

The world melted away from him and the years ticked by, and he lost so many that once made him smile – but the one he has lost, the one that he waits for, never returns when he’s expected. 

And one day Merlin laughed, shattering his years-long silence:

“You always were horrible about waking up on time.”

And it was the stupidest little remark to shatter his years-long silence on, and yet there was a relief in finally speaking, and it flowed out of him, painful and steady. And he said everything that he wished he could have said – rambled, for hours. Merlin still remembers that day, even centuries later.

And the only reason he stopped, hours later, was because he couldn’t stand to have no one replying – couldn’t stand not to hear him answer him, all exasperated and yet fond – that he’s such an idiot. 

(And yet, he spends centuries speaking to Arthur, and never hears a word in return.) 

 

-

 

The day that Arthur comes back, Merlin’s magic sparks back to life where it once lay – not dormant, but unconcerned, because Merlin’s entire existence has centered around _waiting_. The act of waiting. The act of stasis, much of an act as it can be. 

The day Arthur comes back, Merlin feels it – deep down in the frost of his bones, and his entire being snaps back to life in one quick movement when he whips his head up – looking out at the lake that, to so many others, is dried up and gone, and the mist is a little clearer today.

And Merlin is running from his house, faster than he’s moved in years – because for all his years learning new things, he was _never_ good at sports, much less running – but he moves faster, as if by magic perhaps, then he ever has in his life. And the lake is not so much churning as it rippling and Merlin forgets to breathe, stands at the edge of the lake and shakes, his entire body poised with some kind waiting, unsure if he should be running out into the water, banishing the water, or what it is, and what it is that, exactly, makes him know that it’s _today_ despite being an unremarkable and unimportant Tuesday in June. 

And somehow, after all these centuries, this is the waiting that is the most painful. This last few moments of waiting, the swan song before the water parts away. He’s shaking, unsure, eager, knowing that this is the _moment_. He stands at the water’s edge.

And then Arthur slowly emerges from the water, moving gradually, and he is the same as he was that day all those thousands of years ago and Merlin freezes up completely, watching him, memorizing him even though there was never a doubt that he could forget. Even though, after all the things he’s lived, after all the things he’s forgotten – there was never a single detail he let himself forget about Arthur. 

And the moment that he sees Arthur breathe in sharply and open his eyes is the first time in a thousand years that Merlin himself feels as if he is breathing – as if two lives have come back to life in that single moment. 

“Merlin.”

Merlin lurches forward when he sees Arthur, and he gasps out, stuttering to a stop for half a second as he hears that bit of sound – the sound of his _name_ , unspoken now for so long. The sound of his name coming from Arthur’s lips. And how, _how_ could Merlin almost have forgotten that Arthur saying his name had once been and still was his favorite sound in the entire world? 

He hadn’t forgotten. Never. 

“ _Arthur._ ” 

Merlin doesn’t let Arthur say anything else because finally he moves and he throws himself at Arthur, knocks him back into the water with a painful crash and painful tangle of limbs and that red cloak he’d almost forgotten the feel of and he fists his hands in his hair and kisses him, soundly, unable to stop, and Arthur kisses him back, hands heavy on his waist as he holds him close, keeping his head above water and kissing him back as if he were drowning, as if he were still learning to breathe again – but completely and wholly, kissing Merlin with his entire being, as if breathing him in. 

He’d envisioned so many meetings with Arthur, over the years, in his fits of masochism and pain, but this is far better than he could have thought – and no words pass between them. Merlin merely clings to him, knowing that he’s sobbing with relief, and kissing him as if breathing life back into him himself. And Arthur is there – full and solid beneath him, dripping wet and clinging to him just as tightly, and Merlin feels that weight of his fingertips against his ribs and his heart lurches and thuds hard against his chest and he thinks, fears, that this is a dream even when he knows it isn’t. 

And it is a very long time before either of them find need to speak again. 

He knows that there are words Arthur is trying to say to him but Merlin just keeps kissing him – that’s all he can do, that’s all he can want. And he breaks the kiss only to drag his mouth across his jaw and over his cheek, knowing that Arthur is crying, too, much as he also knows Arthur will deny it bitterly, and he kisses him and feels Arthur kissing him back, his breath short and rattling and _there_ and Merlin’s hands shake as he holds Arthur against him, feels him breathing, feels his heartbeat, feels that he is _alive._

Arthur’s lips touch the shell of his ear, and his fingers touch at him, clinging to him, sliding up over his ribs and touching his shoulders, lifting, his thumbs touching at his chin and down over his neck. He drags a fingertip across his lips as Merlin stubbornly kisses at his face, brushing over every inch of him. And Merlin whispers his name, quietly, a soft and needy _Arthur_ and once he says it he can’t stop and it rushes out of him, just his name, _Arthur, Arthur, Arthur—_

And he opens his eyes and looks at Arthur, unable to stop, blinking back the tears that spill out of him and Arthur smiles at him – that exact smile that Merlin has always known, crooked and sincere, lighting up his eyes – still so devastatingly blue. 

“Arthur,” he whispers. 

“I know you know how to say more than that,” Arthur says, and his voice is exactly as he remembers it and he grins at him, crooked teeth and crooked smile and Merlin warms from the inside out.

And he laughs, a true, bright sound that eases something inside of him. Merlin laughs, delighted and bright. He pulls at Arthur until he can kiss him again, smoothing his lips across his and he feels Arthur laugh back at him, and _that_ along with the sound of his name, is definitely his favorite sound in the entire world. Everything about Arthur – is just his favorite. Merlin laughs, slightly hysterical, and kisses Arthur until he remembers the exact taste of his laughter against his mouth and throat.

The laughter gusts out of Merlin, taking him by surprise – as if he’d forgotten the way it sounded, what it felt like, what it tasted like, himself. 

He _had_ forgotten. 

But now it’s there, warm and full and real, and he feels it bubble up and gush out – completely unrestrained, happy. What he’d forgotten and gotten back again.

And the laughter comes lighter when he sees Arthur smile at him, the way it crinkles up the corners of his eyes – as if he, too, had forgotten how to smile until that moment. 

Arthur cups his face and draws him back in, kissing him.


End file.
